Songs of the Flesh review (Midsumma Festival)

Based on a text by Chris Beckey, Songs of the Flesh is coming-of-age fairy tale cum punk-tragedy that follows a young man and his exhaustive pursuit for the name of his love. With its inspiration taken from the bible, the Song of Solomon and Kate Bush, this queer love story is something that will stay with you for some time with performances, text and direction that draws in its audience to take them on a wild, passionate and raging journey.

Using two people to tell the one story brings an element of excitement to the show as each actor brings different energy and interpretation to the single character. Steven Mitchell Wright's remarkable direction ensures that while there is a differentiation in their performances, the two remain linked and the audience sees one protagonist on the stage. Josh Blake and Scott Middleton give fierce and powerful performances as the protagonist, both capturing the fear, anxiety, exhilaration and anger of discovering and pursuing new love and what it unleashes from within themselves.

The Danger Ensemble discuss going beyond skin-deep with its new Midsumma Festival show Songs of the Flesh

The Danger Ensemble have garnered a reputation for creating boundary pushing contemporary and experimental theatre. Since the company's relocation to Melbourne roughly five years ago, we have been fortunate to see such work as The Hamlet Aopcalypse and most recently, Day After Terrible Day. For Midsumma Festival, the company present what could possibly be their most innovative work yet, Songs of the Flesh. Based on a text by Chris Beckey, this coming-of-age fairy tale cum punk-tragedy follows a young man and his exhaustive pursuit for the name of his love. Searching through the pages of fables, history and literature, he finally finds it in The Bible and then deep within his own flesh.


"Songs of the Flesh actually started with my desire to experience solo performance back in the early 2000s. I’d been working professionally in theatre for a few years and I’d been interested in solo performance for a while," Beckey tells me. "I had heard Kate Bush's "The Song of Solomon" from her 1993 album The Red Shoes, and it is a beautiful song where Kate interpolates passages from the book of the Bible of the same name. I’d gotten a bit obsessed with the beauty of the poetry within those passages, so I gave it a read and I found that there were passages there that resonated with an 
experience I’d had in Brisbane in the mid-90s. So my idea was to arrange and edit the text of "The Song of Solomon" to tell the story of my experience."

Day After Terrible Day review

I learnt a few years ago that the apparent inspiration for Miss Havisham from Great Expectations was an Australian woman buried at Sydney's Camperdown Cemetery. I'd never really given it more thought than that, but it is said that in the 1850s, Emily Eliza Donnithorne was jilted on the morning of her wedding and subsequently became a recluse. Thirty years later she died, still wearing her wedding dress.

In its latest production Day After Terrible Day, The Danger Ensemble make use of Donnithorne's story to explore the sorrow, grief and mourning that comes from falling in love and being unable to let go when the love ends. Director Mitchell Steven Wright builds a world that is macabre and disturbing from the very beginning when we are greeted by two real estate agents hoping to sell us a property. They are dressed in pink outfits with hair and make-up to the nines, but something about them doesn't look quite right. Once we enter, it is not long before we encounter one of the previous owners.